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In Italy's election campaign, opposition parties have pledged research reform — but nothing will change until agency chiefs start playing by the rules.
As the general election looms, candidate prime minister Romano Prodi strives to convince Italy's discontented scientists that he can turn things around. Alison Abbott reports.
A series of mental challenges is helping physicists to prepare for the strange data they may get when the next particle accelerator goes live. Jenny Hogan joins the work-out.
Studies of medical literature are confirming what many suspected — reporters of clinical trials do not always play straight. Jim Giles talks to those pushing for a fairer deal.
Cases involving long-term users of Vioxx will, as Meredith Wadman reports, determine the true cost to Merck and the drug industry of the painkiller's withdrawal.
When it comes to making shapes out of DNA, the material is there, and its properties are understood. What was missing was a convincing, universal design scheme to allow our capabilities to unfold to the full.
Abnormal protein clumps of many varieties build up in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer's disease. But which types actually cause memory deficits? The behaviour of model mice might help to find out.
A cleverly engineered molecule uses light to generate a charge-separated state and so cause one of its components to move. It's the latest study of a molecular machine that exploits nature's most plentiful energy source.
A fossil dinosaur that ‘nests’ with feathered relations in the dinosaur phylogenetic tree did not, it seems, have feathers. The discovery will encourage a re-evaluation of feather evolution.
Quantum bodies that can't settle down together in pairs get on fine in a cosy threesome. This startling claim about the private life of particles has just seen its first experimental confirmation.
How did dinosaurs stand and move? Computer simulation and other methods have told us much about how dinosaurs did and did not move, but they have not yet reached their full potential.
A robust, versatile, one-pot bottom-up nanotechnology fabrication method uses a few-hundred short DNA strands to 'staple' a very long strand into two-dimensional structures of 100 nm in diameter and resembling any desired shape, such as squares, 'nanofaces' and stars.
A combination of mutant phenotype analysis, genome comparisons and proteomics has elucidated the metabolic network of Salmonella during typhoid fever and enteritis infections. Owing to many redundant pathways, Salmonella metabolism is surprisingly robust, thus severely limiting the number of new drug targets.
Observations of an infrared nebula with an intertwined double helix approximately 100 parsecs from the Galaxy's dynamical centre indicate that it is a torsional Alfvn wave propagating vertically away from the Galactic disk, driven by rotation of the magnetized circumnuclear gas disk.
The discovery of a brown-dwarf eclipsing binary system presents a puzzle, as despite both objects having large radii in accordance with current theory the less-massive brown dwarf is the hotter of the pair, contrary to theoretical predictions.
The first experimental observation of Efimov's prediction confirms key theoretical predictions and represents a starting point from which to explore the universal properties of resonantly interacting few-body systems.
An analogue of nano-indentation performed on a colloidal crystal provides direct images of defect formation in real time and on the single-particle level — allowing investigation of the effects of thermal fluctuations.
Crustal thinning where continental plates break apart can be accomplished by a system of conjugate concave downward faults, instead of multiple normal faults, through exhumation of mid-crustal and mantle material.
A new theropod — as well preserved as Archaeopteryx from the same area — surprisingly shows no sign of feathery integument, suggesting that the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs was more complex than previously thought.
Optimal allocation of conservation resources between regions can be problematic because stochastic dynamic programming breaks down for larger problems — but the identification of two heuristics that closely approximate the optimal solution and can be applied at any spatial scale is reported.
A proposal for a simple, unified model in which a single mechanism — passive gene loss — enabled whole-genome duplication and led to the rapid emergence of new yeast species.
An analysis of the finished sequence of human chromosome 12 representing 4.5% of the human genome determines that chromosome 12 hosts a number of genes mutated in specific cancers, as well as movement disorders and potentially Alzheimer's disease.
Mice of the type used to model Alzheimer's disease develop a hazy memory around middle age, well before they show neuronal loss and other disease-like symptoms — this has been attributed to extracellular accumulation of a soluble assembly of amyloid-β protein, dubbed Aβ star.
The protein PerR, from Bacillus subtilis, senses peroxides through a mechanism that involves the incorporation of one oxygen atom into histidine residues in the active site. The reduction of hydrogen peroxide by metal ions contributes to the inactivation of enzymes in vivo, but this is the first time that this process has been shown to be involved in the sensing of peroxide.
Elucidation of the X-ray structures of luciferase in several different states has determined that there is a specific conformational change of a key amino acid that determines the colour of the bioluminescence.
